posted by a #Yiddishist acquaintance on FB, apparently the linguist Max Weinreich had a special #Yiddish typeface with a ligature in the tsvey vovn װI'm on the fence if it's more legible or not. but interesting!
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posted by a #Yiddishist acquaintance on FB, apparently the linguist Max Weinreich had a special #Yiddish typeface with a ligature in the tsvey vovn װ
I'm on the fence if it's more legible or not. but interesting! -
Riley S. Faelanreplied to Daniel Carkner🥀 last edited by [email protected]
@carkner It might be more for æsthetics rather than legibility per se, kind of like the Latin script's fl, ffi, and st. The st one is a left-over from some mediæval scribal flourish, I think, but the ones with a letter with an ascender following 'f' are purely about correcting the kerning, which in numerous fonts leads to the 'f' getting combined with the following letter(s) into a single glyph.
This ligature is even encoded in Unicode, as U+05F0
HEBREW LIGATURE YIDDISH DOUBLE VAV
, although it seems to me that all the Hebrew-capable fonts that come with MacOS just render it as, well, tsvey vovn mechanically placed next to each other: װ. -
Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@carkner I don't know it for a fact, but my hunch is, there might have been a small movement to convert the Yiddish digraphs into ligatures in the late 19th century, at about the time typewriters started getting widely adopted.
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by [email protected]
@carkner I might have misestimated: according to https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/language-literature-culture/vault/story-behind-yiddish-book-centers-yiddish-typewriter-collection, the very first (mass-produced) Yiddish typewriter came out in 1903, made by the Remington Typewriter Company. I thought Yiddish typewriters to be in active use by 1890s. (And I still don't know when they diverged from Hebrew typewriters; the Nick Block's webpage is broken.)
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@carkner The Internet Archive has an old, working version of the page: https://web.archive.org/web/20190717161620/https://translations.nickblockphd.com/blog/culture/history-yiddish-typewriter.html
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by [email protected]
@carkner This one, labelled by Dr Block as a Remington 10 from ca. 1909, definitely already had dedicated single keys for both tsvey vovn and tsvey yudn. I'm not entirely sure if they're so visible because the previous owner used it to type Hebrew and so these keys didn't wear out, or because they're positioned in a way that happens to not scatter the light away.
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Daniel Carkner🥀replied to Riley S. Faelan last edited by
@riley very cool, love this kind of stuff. also "Underwood Semitic" from the link above as I understand it if you live in the right area (Eastern US) Yiddish keyboards are not as hard to get as that post implies, I've seen people who went and asked and got them for free. maybe they were lucky
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Riley S. Faelanreplied to Daniel Carkner🥀 last edited by [email protected]
@carkner I guess 'Underwood Semitic' marks it as fully designed for Hebrew/Yiddish, as contrary to conversion from a Latin-script model, which appears to have been quite common. There's even cases (pun sort of intended) where manufacturers made bicameral Hebrew typewriters merely because the logic of a 20th century (Latin-script) typewriter calls for two distinct characters per typebar, and thus, per key: